{"id":108526,"date":"2025-12-12T10:32:49","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T15:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/?post_type=perspectives-article&p=108526"},"modified":"2025-12-12T10:32:49","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T15:32:49","slug":"when-rules-no-longer-apply","status":"publish","type":"perspectives-article","link":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/perspectives-article\/when-rules-no-longer-apply\/","title":{"rendered":"When \u201cRules\u201d No Longer Apply"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many concerned Americans, the Trump administration\u2019s seeming contempt for rules-based policies has been a source of deep anxiety. Democrats<\/a>, in particular, have railed against a president they maintain is \u201cactively\u201d destroying \u201cthe rule of law he claims to be restoring.\u201d From selectively complying with federal court orders<\/a> to enacting arguably \u201crogue<\/a>\u201d immigration enforcement operations, customary rules no longer appear to apply.<\/p>\n

\"A

From the highest levels of US government to comic books, the early Cold War period had Americans debating the ethics of warfare in the face of communism. \u201cAtrocity City,\u201d <\/em>War Adventures on the Battlefield no. 2, June 1952, Animirth Comics, Inc.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Nowhere is this more clear than in the nation\u2019s military policy, especially at a moment when the commander-in-chief has threatened a land invasion<\/a> of Venezuela and his secretary of defense allegedly ordered US military forces to \u201ckill everybody<\/a>\u201d aboard a suspected drug vessel.<\/p>\n

These actions, however, should not surprise given the administration\u2019s martial rhetoric over the past few months. In what the New York Times<\/em> deemed an unparalleled politicized \u201clecture<\/a>\u201d to senior-ranking US military officers, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s late September speech<\/a> at Quantico, Virginia, raised deep concerns over the nation\u2019s current state of civil-military relations.<\/p>\n

While critics<\/a> ridiculed the secretary\u2019s narrow emphasis on \u201cwokeness<\/a>,\u201d physical fitness, and personal grooming standards, perhaps the lecture\u2019s most ominous portion was the condemnation against \u201cstupid rules of engagement.\u201d Leaning into his self-proclaimed warrior ethos<\/a>, Hegseth shared that senior officers no longer would be handcuffed by \u201cpolitically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though many Americans were taken aback by the secretary\u2019s comments, there are clear Cold War analogies to such bellicose thinking and to the sometimes-heated debates around the ethical conduct of American servicemembers during times of war.<\/p>\n

In 1954, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff developed its first common set of modern rules of engagement<\/a> for regulating wartime violence, fearing the consequences of unintended escalation of hostilities in the atomic era. That same year, however, President Dwight D. Eisenhower commissioned a panel to study the effectiveness of the Central Intelligence Agency\u2019s covert activities that cast doubt upon such rules. The study proceeded under the direction of retired General James Doolittle, who had gained fame during World War II leading a daring B-25 aerial raid against Japan in April 1942.<\/p>\n

Finalized in September 1954, \u201cThe Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency<\/a>\u201d left little doubt about the supposedly existential threat facing the United States. To Doolittle and his team, Soviet-inspired communism was a \u201cfundamentally repugnant philosophy\u201d at odds with \u201clong-standing American concepts of \u2018fair play.\u2019\u201d The panel then suggested that any naivety in confronting this \u201cimplacable enemy\u201d bent on \u201cworld domination\u201d jeopardized US national security. As Doolittle\u2019s panel surmised, \u201cThere are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.\u201d If the United States was to survive, then the CIA had to engage in activities \u201cmore ruthless than that employed by the enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

These fear-based conceptualizations of a savage<\/a>, inhuman enemy who didn\u2019t play by the rules echoed in policy documents throughout the early Cold War era. Just two months after Doolittle rendered his report, Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson<\/a>, in a memo to the National Security Council, depicted communists as seeking \u201cultimate world domination, using armed force, if necessary.\u201d To accomplish such a global aim, the enemy was surreptitiously engaging in \u201cefforts to infiltrate, subvert and control\u201d noncommunist governments around the globe.<\/p>\n

Government officials portrayed the United States as facing an implacable and ruthless enemy, perhaps worse than the Nazi regime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In these fear-inducing narratives, government officials portrayed the United States as facing an implacable and ruthless enemy, perhaps worse than the Nazi regime defeated less than a decade earlier. As Eisenhower himself noted in a year-end National Security Council meeting<\/a>, even \u201cHitler was too horrified at the prospect of gas warfare\u201d for fear of allied retaliation. (Apparently, the president deemed the German use of gas chambers at concentration camps like Auschwitz distinct from conventional \u201cwarfare.\u201d) \u201cThere were some,\u201d Ike said, \u201cwho believe that modern warfare imposes its own limitations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, not all of Eisenhower\u2019s martial predecessors would have agreed with the World War II allied supreme commander on this point. Did warfare, in fact, impose its own limitations? Perhaps not, and thus the need for more formal, violence-regulating protocols. During the American Civil War, for instance, Union Army leaders promulgated General Order No. 100, known as the Lieber Code<\/a>, which required the ethical treatment of civilian populations and forbade the killing of prisoners of war. Lieber\u2019s code became the basis for the Hague Convention of 1907<\/a>, which among other wartime restraints, mandated that naval belligerents \u201ctake steps to look for the shipwrecked, sick, and wounded, and to protect them.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the questionable relevance of these wartime limits clearly was on the minds of senior Cold War policymakers as 1954 came to a close. The same month Secretary Wilson railed against the global communist \u201cmachinery\u201d and its \u201cwar-making potential,\u201d CIA director Allen W. Dulles<\/a> warned of substantial Soviet advantages \u201cin the field of integrated subversive warfare.\u201d The problem came down to basic discrepancies in following the accepted rules\u2014and, by extension, laws\u2014of warfare. (US Code Title 50<\/a> governs the intelligence community\u2019s operations.) According to Dulles, the Soviet system was \u201cnot subject to the pressures generated by democratic political and legal processes.\u201d In short, the communists weren\u2019t fighting fairly.<\/p>\n

Against such an existential threat, one ideologically committed to global domination, it thus made little sense to follow dewy-eyed rules that might then lead to America\u2019s demise. The stakes simply were too high. Nor were these policy prescriptions being considered in a vacuum. Popular culture mirrored debates over a rules-based international order.<\/p>\n

In June 1952, while the United States fought a war against communism in Korea, War Adventures on the Battlefield <\/em>comics published \u201cAtrocity Story<\/a>.\u201d In the illustrated tale, wicked communists herd together Korean civilians and murder these \u201cinnocent victims of war\u201d before turning their attention to captured American prisoners and \u201cbutchering\u201d them as well. At story\u2019s end, the comic invited its young readers to consider fighting \u201catrocity with atrocity\u201d and \u201cexecuting the red prisoners we have in our stockades.\u201d A senior officer, however, voices his concern: \u201cIf we did that . . . we\u2019d be shoving civilization back to the dark ages of barbarism and savagery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back on this fraught Cold War moment, the Battlefield<\/em> officer had a point. Wartime rules of engagement are not some \u201cwoke\u201d constraint curbing military effectiveness as Secretary Hegseth would lead us to believe. As one legal expert<\/a> rightfully notes, they are\u2014and long have been\u2014\u201cthe primary means of regulating the use of force in armed conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the implications of unregulated applications of military force were evident throughout the Cold War era. By the time General Doolittle submitted his report to the president, the CIA already had assisted in coups overthrowing the governments in Iran<\/a> and Guatemala<\/a>, events that not only undermined legal clarity<\/a>\u2014as covert operations are inclined to do\u2014but led to long-term instabilities that indelibly shaped regional politics in the Middle East and Latin America.<\/p>\n

Wartime rules of engagement are not some \u201cwoke\u201d constraint curbing military effectiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Arguably, similarly enduring consequences could be felt, both at home and abroad, when American troops flaunted rules of engagement during the global war on terror, from the human-rights violations at the Abu Ghraib<\/a> prison complex in Iraq to the killing of unarmed civilians<\/a> in Afghanistan. According to one US Marine Corps officer<\/a>, multiple violations of the rules of engagement in both Iraq and Afghanistan led to \u201cnegative and lasting impacts\u201d on American counterinsurgency operations in those war-torn countries. Could it be that sensible rules assisted military commanders in accomplishing their mission rather than impeding them?<\/p>\n

More recently, the Trump administration\u2019s decision to employ US military forces for the targeting of alleged drug smugglers<\/a> off the Venezuela coast, all while deploying<\/a> an increased naval presence off the shores of Latin America and threatening outright invasion, has led numerous legal specialists<\/a> to deem these \u201cpremeditated and summary extrajudicial killings illegal.\u201d Secretary of State Marco Rubio<\/a> has dismissed such legalistic hand-wringing, judging that the president had the authority \u201cunder exigent circumstances to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

War is chaotic and intended to be. But disdaining international rules of engagement and laws of warfare by inflating, if not exaggerating, threats to national security are counterproductive<\/a> to US military operations and the troops who carry them out. Indeed, they put into question the very definition of \u201cwar.\u201d<\/a> Some critics, for instance, have argued that the Trump administration, in deploying National Guard troops to American cities, is fomenting civil war.<\/a><\/p>\n

Depicting enemies, both foreign and domestic, as inhuman beasts who only respond to brute force and \u201cmaximum lethality,\u201d whether during the Cold War or as Secretary Hegseth intimated in Quantico, leaves little room for commanders to use rules of engagement as an effective \u201ccontrol mechanism<\/a>\u201d for which they originally were intended.<\/p>\n

And, perhaps most importantly, the men and women serving in uniform today need not be judged \u201cpolitically correct\u201d simply for being discerning managers of violence as they represent American society on the modern battlefield.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disdaining wartime rules of engagement, whether during the Cold War or today, are counterproductive to US military operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":108529,"template":"","aha-topic":[],"month":[563],"geographic-taxonomy":[56],"perspectives-section":[525],"post-type":[],"thematic-taxonomy":[19,38],"year":[875],"class_list":{"0":"post-108526","1":"perspectives-article","2":"type-perspectives-article","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","5":"hentry","6":"month-december","7":"geographic-taxonomy-united-states","8":"perspectives-section-perspectives-daily","9":"thematic-taxonomy-current-events-in-historical-context","10":"thematic-taxonomy-political","11":"year-875","17":"year-2025","18":"has-featured-image"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/perspectives-article\/108526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/perspectives-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/perspectives-article"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/perspectives-article\/108526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108530,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/perspectives-article\/108526\/revisions\/108530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"aha-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/aha-topic?post=108526"},{"taxonomy":"month","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/month?post=108526"},{"taxonomy":"geographic-taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/geographic-taxonomy?post=108526"},{"taxonomy":"perspectives-section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/perspectives-section?post=108526"},{"taxonomy":"post-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-type?post=108526"},{"taxonomy":"thematic-taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematic-taxonomy?post=108526"},{"taxonomy":"year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/year?post=108526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}